Elaine Mitchener Solo -- Café Oto Livestream, 23.03.20

March 2020 has moved incredibly quickly, for reasons of which anyone reading this will be all too aware. Likewise, this will be no doubt littered with typos and overly-elongated sentences: perhaps others share this feeling that there is right now too much to say, all at once, and, simultaneously, that one feels numbed to not being able to say anything at all, overtaken by events, swept up in them, left behind. Yet at the same time, things have ground to a weirdly atemporal standstill, with all the glacial suddenness of what seems to be an imminent world historical leap: the treading of a fine line, a balance (though hardly balanced), between slivers of hope—that the current cruelty of economic and “social” arrangement might collapse, and that in its place agitation for transformed notions of social justice might emerge—and premonitions of horror and catastrophe, as the atomisation of social life reduces the possibilities for collective action and agitation, sharpens the knife edge that so many without the luxury of a comfortable “day-to-day” already face. This process exists on every level, from local to international to global. There's the chaos—the most noisily and easily-trumpeted—into which even the wealthiest of Western powers are plunged: powers whose arrogance assumed this could never happen, and thus made and (failed to) deploy utterly inadequate containment measures. Then, and inseparable from this, are the global inequalities by which, for the West, pandemic is always “elsewhere”—othered, racialised—and by which those who suffer the most and are the most at risk, those who are sacrificed on the pyre, those who are rendered expendable and peripheral, are always those who are already othered, racialised, those who, pandemic or no pandemic, are pushed to the mere brink of survivable life. London—where the UK government’s incompetent and disastrous laissez-faire refusal to act, followed by abrupt about-faces and the ever-present risk of authoritarianism, has allowed a high and sudden spread in cases, caught between “business-as-usual” (economic flow over human life) and war-footing “Blitz spirit” measures—is an uncertain place in the lately-woken spring sun.

Maybe it seems either callous or more important than ever—or both, or neither—to focus on music in this instance. But I’ll do so anyway. Since the earlier announcement of “social distancing” measures—in which the population seemed to temporarily took the lead over a government which briefly flirted with the absurd notion of “herd immunity” as (non)containment strategy—Café Oto switched its usual roster of gigs to a series of livestreams, in which musicians performed to an empty venue, broadcast on the web. Tuesday’s was the first I’d managed to catch, and just as the livestream began, the UK government announced what—in the often disastrous confusion that’s typified the governmental response to the increasing spread of the Covid outbreak over the past few weeks—seemed to amount to a full-on lockdown (police presence, trips outside rationed, most businesses closed—all with unclear provision for those on precarious contracts, with no fixed abode, and for all the various reasons that the cosy option of “working from home” is hardly an option for many). So this would be the last of these livestreams (now archived online: https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/archive/), the announcement exacerbating the already eerie fragility of two solo sets to a split and invisible audience (for it’s the coming together—to borrow Rzewski’s title—of audience that makes the socius of such music as much as it is the coming together of musicians, and as much as that coming together can occur across temporal and physical spaces, via recordings, scores and the like). That announcement also threatened to overwhelm the music, and I found it hard to focus on Kerry Yong’s performance of the first three of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseuax, fine though the performance was. Instead, all I could notice really were physical details: Yong acting as his own page-turner, moving the sheets on top of the piano—as if, like Igor Levit, he were giving the recital from his own living room—the way Yong’s hands seemed to glide with a kind of serenity down the keyboard even as he was actually executing some of the more tricky of Messiaen’s trilled avian notation-fantasias. Or maybe this was just a function of the inevitably glitchy nature of the livestream format, by the fact that, for the past few days of house-bound distancing, when I open the window all I hear is birdsong and building work and sirens and I’m not sure if silence or noise is more reason for alarm.

The second half was originally billed as Elaine Mitchener with bassist Neil Charles—who gave a superlative performance as part of Anthony Braxton’s Standards Quartet at Oto a few months ago, when all this seemed barely a blink in anyone’s eye—but ended up being Mitchener solo. For at least an hour, Mitchener crooned, howled, answered back, debated, channeled, chattered, dug deep and floored things in a solo vocal display astonishing not just for its virtuosity—Mitchener has Cathy Berberian levels of wild skill—but for what that virtuosity enabled her to do. This was emotionally heightened by the official announcement, and by all the uncertainty of the previous weeks, and of the weeks or months to come. Mitchener seemed to take that uncertainty in and on, to fully inhabit it, making it a ground from which to begin, while also offering the rock-like comfort against it. This comfort, this alternative, is something already central to Mitchener's music-making. By this I mean an alternative mode of temporality, which has two elements. Firstly, a total openness and ability to move within the moment—improvisational capacity, expressively buoyed by a variety of physical movement and gesture that responds to / echoes / drives the sound. Secondly, the aim to suggest, or even inhabit, alternative temporalities—cosmic, spiritual, non-Wester—the lyrics of Sun Ra, their afro-Futurist refusal of the killing constraints of presentness through projections into (imagined) past and (imagined) future, their atopic utopianism which is, of course, more material than any of the capitalist realist lies we’re daily told even as they break/thrive under the pressure of crisis. That’s an imprecise way of rendering what, in the experiential necessity Mitchener’s vocal work demands of performer and listener alike, is absolutely clear. You can stop reading and just click below if you want to know what I mean.



Mitchener began wordless, voiceless, lighting a bag of cheap candles (tea-lights, right?) on one of Oto’s signature tables, ringing a service bell every time one was lit. I wondered if it was a ritual for the dead—as Mitchener has previously memorialised the victims of criminal negligence in Grenfell Tower—so, here, those who have died so far of the virus, or perhaps those to come—or if that was placing too much symbolic freight on it, or if, as prelude and ritual, it was something that existed as a space deliberately open to interpretation: an entering in. Moving to the microphone, Mitchener began the recital’s musicked part with words that only after a minute or so made themselves manifest as decipherable words—stretched, distorted, chopped by their staggered speech-sung emergence, like a voice that’s trying to get out but at the same time trying to hide, operating within contradictory impulses, and it’s only from such contradiction that the full soar of sung note, of melisma or melody, can emerge; must be earned. The words, as far as I can tell, pertained to (a particular interpretation of) ancient Egyptian mythology—”the focus of oneness in time and space”.

Ra is the first principle which emerges out of the Primeval Waters. He is the subtle, singular principle of Creation, the focus of oneness in time and space. The Primeval Ocean itself transcends time and space and is beyond existence and non-existence. Ra is the first principle to emerge out of the Absolute (as Ra-Tem). His emergence signifies the beginning of existence

Point from which creation begins, as Oliver Lake put it—a singular principle that is yet subtle, the beginning of existence yet itself somewhere in between realms. It’s easy to metaphorize this:creation as a point which is not a point in time or space but refuses those categories, yet which maintains a necessary cohesion akin to that of any creative being; creation recreated every time we add to it through human activity. So in a sense that fragmented phrase—in Mitchener’s rendition, removed from origin, emerging in barely decipherable form (and decipherment only working backwards, as one stitches together a word from a syllable, a syllable from a string of notes, etc)—serves as another way of entering in, another statement of purpose, but also a statement of elsewhere, not as escapism, not as evasion of the moment where we are—for the rest of the performance channeled that with a ferocious and necessary intensity—but as the opening up of alternatives to the (mis)management of death in which our lives, more than ever, are now variously and unequally entwined.

The rest of the ‘recital’ passed in something of a blur, though it was beautifully precise, moving through a series of demarcated and holistically-constructed pieces, as Mitchener removed each page from her music stand (whether scores of simply words / prompts, I wasn't sure, and it didn't seem to matter), laying them on the floor. About half-way through, some Sun Ra lyrics appeared, as well as some pieces from Mitchener’s “sings the Black Avant Garde“ project, in which vocal pieces from ‘free jazz’ repertoire are treated as occasions for recital, given the seriousness they deserve as compositions, in the processing restoring the presence of the voice (particularly the gendered female voice) to free jazz, in which it is essential (Linda Sharrock! Patty Waters! Jeanne Lee! June Tyson!), but from which it is too often excluded. Remembered in no particular order, the other pieces included Archie Shepp and Jeanne Lee’s “There is a Balm in Gilead”, one of the great recordings of the 1960s, no doubt, Mitchener here echoing not only Lee’s own relatively un-extemporized renditions of the melody, but also the counter-melodies by Shepp’s tenor saxophone and Lester Bowie’s ghostly trumpet. There were Ra lyrics, removed from their original melody and rendered more tonally abstract, to the accompaniment of a shaker. There was an echo of classic Berberian-esque performance-art/avant-garde ‘New Music’ theatre featuring a trio of squeaky toys (a doll, a pig, and a long-necked rubber chicken)—more extraordinary here than the seriousness with which Mitchener treated these as instruments, the refusal to play for laughs or excess, was the fact that she managed to pull this off. Another pieec (perhaps the second), which began as a kind of spoken dialogue, of interpellation, hailing and refusal, sometimes seeming to touch on the present moment—spectres of people hoarding food and fighting in supermarket, as Mitchener listed various ingredients and foodstuffs—and in which voice’s internalised and externalised, inherently dialogic nature, could be tracked not only in the range of sound Mitchener produced—closer to Phil Minton or Maggie Nicols than Lee or Berbarian here—but in the viscerally expressive gestures by which she slapped, caressed, and framed her face and body; gestures of balancing and centering, of falling way and apart, holding the music in and letting it, letting oneself collapse but keeping it all together. Towards the end, Yong, who'd been sitting the whole time at the piano to the right of the stage area, silent and observant, briefly joined, with some brief rumbles of strummed piano strings; but it was Mitchener alone who ended things with an utterly devastating rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’. Written by a slaver-turned-abolitionist, the piece of course transcends its nature as white guilt-exculpation and religious apologia (Newton’s spiritual conversion predating by some years his ceasing to participate in the slave trade) to become a vehicle for libration, sung on Civil Rights marches by Fannie Lou Hamer, Mahalia Jackson and others—as Judy Collins put it, “to give magical protection – a charm to ward off danger, an incantation to the angels of heaven to descend”. So that history, the felt presence of the melody as something so familiar most of the audience could probably sing it—something Mitchener half-jokingly suggested when she said “sing along if you like”—but very quickly Mitchener, her live vocals dragging behind I think two or three voices of pre-recorded, multi-tracked rendition a la the phased unison/separation of Feldman’s ‘Three Voices‘, swayed a long ways from the familiar melody, her live line more and more hanging behind the pre-recordings and progressively omitting words, consonants, articulation in an elongated slur, so that the final round of the tune’s familiar contour essentially lacked either the melody or words except as sounds in the memory. As this process occurred, Mitchener sunk lower and lower to the floor, and closer and closer in to herself, the world around kept out—in its mendacity—yet allowed in—as something like Collins’s protective spell—for those who need it. "I was not sure the magic worked outside the church walls ... in the open air of Mississippi", noted Collins. "But I wasn’t taking any chance". Likewise today: who knows if such spells work. Who knows what that would mean. But I just want to register for now the strength in vulnerability of this performance as exemplary, as gift, benediction, and the rest: both a farewell to past certainties and a beginning to a situation we’re only, really, beginning to contemplate.

Pierre Boulez at the Aldeburgh Festival

Pierre Boulez/ Ensemble Intercontemporain
Saturday, 26th June 2010

*Evening Performance*

Varèse - Octandre
Ligeti - Chamber Concerto
Elliott Carter - What are Years? (world premiere)
Pierre Boulez - Dérive 2

Ensemble Intercontemporain, cond. Pierre Boulez
Claire Booth - soprano (Carter only)

*Late Concert*

Pierre Boulez - Dialogue de l’ombre double
Pierre Boulez - Anthèmes II

Jérôme Comte - clarinet
Jeanne-Marie Conquer - violin

“The most elegant way of solving the opera problem would be to blow up the opera houses.” "All art of the past must be destroyed." It is with controversial statements such as these that Pierre Boulez will forever be associated – for some. But, as should be obvious to anyone who shares a more than cursory acquaintance with the facts of the case, a portrayal of the man that is merely based on such snippets just will not do. For instance, let’s take the case of his more recent compositional output. In a 1993 interview with Andy Carvin, Boulez outlines the notion that his late compositions form a part of the same intricate ur-text – though this implies more a microscopic, densely-detailed focussing in and absorption with a particular set of materials, than a mystically grand, over-reaching ‘great project’. "My recent music is much like a family tree - one tree spawns many other trees, and so on. Dérive I is from Repons, mostly music I left out, so I derived it from the piece, hence the name. Dérive II is based off of studies I did for Repons. Dérive III is also like that. Repons itself was my response to Poesies pour pouvoir, which I had written over twenty years earlier. As long as material from another piece is not used fully, I like to expand on it until it is exhausted. This is why they are all works-in-progress."

In relation to this, one might recall words written thirty years earlier, in ‘Sonate, Que Me Veux-Tu?’: "Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed? Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to musical thought as it is today, or to the actual state that we have reached in the evolution of musical technique, which is increasingly concerned with the investigation of a relative world, a permanent 'discovering' rather like the state of 'permanent revolution'." The late works might therefore be seen, at least in part, as a practical enactment of such theoretical concerns: there is no one big discovery, but a continual working off tiny fragments, both the ghosts of past form and texture, and the novelties of radical new material, created in the work of the Second Viennese School and Darmstadt.

Thus, despite the big, controversial statements, made in the 60s, which always seem to be brought up as a stick to beat Boulez with (irrespective, perhaps, of the actual merits of his music (and irrespective, also, of the precise content of those statements), what we have here is a complex and intensive investigation of *musical* possibilities, rather than a big, broad-brush, slap-dash, shock-value modernist act of terrorism.

Given this, it should surprise no-one that Boulez’s appearance at the 2010 Aldeburgh Festival appears far less controversial today than it might have done as recently as twenty years ago; now in his eighties, Boulez has managed to largely shed his reputation as enfant-terrible and agent-provocateur; he is probably even more renowned as a conductor than as a composer, and his works can now be taken on their own merits. Thus, the programme he performed, along with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, needed make no concessions to conventional tastes: this was a firmly modernist selection (though Varèse’s ‘Octandre’ (1923), which opened proceedings, is hardly a new piece), containing, alongside the aforementioned Varèse, Ligeti’s ‘Chamber Concerto’, an Elliott Carter premiere, and one of Boulez’s own more recent works (albeit one which, though it only reached completed form in 2006, was begun in 1988).

The Varèse and Ligeti pieces, with which the concert began, were slightly marred by an occasional sense of strain from individual players, the timing or pitch sometimes being fractionally off – especially during the fiendish, mechanically repetitive figures in the outer movements of the Ligeti. But Varèse’s utterly unique style – those simultaneous high, whistle-frequency piccolo shrieks and bottom-end trombone growls, the exquisitely constructed dissonant sharpness and timbral contrast, the ghost of fanfares, moulded through a haze –nonetheless came through very well, as did Ligeti’s almost foot-tapping, moto perpetuo, jazzy rhythms, sliding strings, and gently swaying, organ-centred drones. The Carter piece (can this man really be 102 years old?), a short cycle of Marianne Moore settings, was perhaps more conventionally structured than is normal for him – at least, in terms of texture; there was a fairly straightforward contrast between ensemble blocks and the soprano’s solo line, rather than a multiplying web of individual interactions and dramas within that ensemble, but there were some satisfying moments, such as the second movement, during which the chamber group was reduced to just cello and harp (playing some particular striking fast, high figures, right at the top range of the instrument), and a lovely final exchange in the last movement, in which a whole succession of motifs seemed to be triggered by a throw-away vibraphone phrase.

The real meat of the concert, though, came with the second half, during which just one work was performed: Boulez’s own Dérive II, one of his more recent pieces (it was completed only a few years ago), during which a constant stream of material is derived from harmonic material unfolded at the very start; this material is then expanded and expounded upon for the next hour or so. Though the sense of continuous, onward flow (there are very few moments to catch the breath), might seem to point to certain affinities with improvisation, the constant, back-and-forth references to previously-played material, the intricacy in which motifs evolve, seemingly disappearing into material which they have generated, only to return in their original form once again – this indicates a much tighter organisational logic than that allowed by improvisation. Nonetheless, perhaps the *listener* in some way has to work in an improvisational manner, to adapt to the speed with which ideas unfold, and to develop particular strategies for listening that take account both of the interaction between particular soloists and sub-groups in the ensemble, and the flow of the music as a whole, emerging from the ensemble as a whole.

Metaphorically speaking, the piece might be likened to interlacing tracery; vines, weeds wound round each-other; entwining patterns, the fantastic complexity of calligraphy. Boulez seems obsessed by relay figures, passed round from musician to musician, as well as by dividing the ensemble into mini-ensembles, united by their particular sonorities: droning, oboe-led woodwinds (reminiscent of ‘Rituel In Memoriam Bruno Maderna’), piano, vibraphone and percussion, with their metallic, chiming, gamelan-quality, and smoother, lusher strings (once more evoking memories of an earlier Boulez work – this time, the ‘Livre Pour Cordes’). In addition, the cello, sometimes lyrical, sometimes ferociously active, often seemed to be favoured as a solo instrument (though more in the sense that the material it played was independent, distinct from any particular group that was playing at the same time, than in any ‘soloistic’, concerto-like sense). There was much to savour here, both colouristically and harmonically: were it not for the near-information-overload of this virtually pause-less piece, one might be tempted to place it quite firmly within a tradition of sensuous, richly-textured French music that stretches from Debussy to Dutilleux, and even to the Spectralists. And Messiaen, Boulez’s teacher, and perhaps the ultimate exponent of this trend (so much so that he could veer towards the Hollwyood-esque; though this in no way counterbalanced his clanging, stridently percussive sensibility), seemed to crop up a few times, particularly in some melodic material for bassoon that appear about two-thirds of the way in.

One came away with the impression that ‘Dérive II’ basically says, ‘if you can’t be bothered to immediately give this music your full attention, you’ll become hopelessly lost’; in absolutely no way could this be construed as ‘background’ or ‘programme’ music, and the avoidance of melodrama, of the ‘grand gesture’ might be seen as a fundamentally anti-Romantic element. If there is any excess here, it comes through the rigorous attention to detail, through the fastidious working-through of material, rather than through conceptual over-reaching, through self-inflated, egotistical folly. And the audience on this occasion seemed to realize this, to be willing to lend their concentration to the piece; there was great applause as Boulez, who, appearing somewhat frail, supported himself by holding onto a harp, stepped down from the podium – an ovation that seemed more than merely token.

Nit-picking, one might perhaps question how much Boulez’s conducting actually influenced the performers in his own piece – so complex were the scores in front of them that they could only dart quick glances up to the front of the stage, making it unlikely that they were really responding to most of his signals. I suspect that much of the work in this regard was done in rehearsals – Boulez drilling the Ensemble, instilling in them a sense of the ebb and flow of his own piece, and remaining on stage as a reference point perhaps as much for the audience as for the players. And, to be sure, it added something to the sense of occasion to see the octogenarian up there conducting, his back to the audience, hands moving out to the side in quick, neat, precise motions that suggested he was totally in control of what was happening.

This was not the end of things, however; a portion of the audience, and Boulez himself, proceeded from the main concert hall over to the smaller, but perhaps even more attractive space of the Britten Studio: another high-ceilinged room, this time with more steeply-tiered seats (somewhat like the arrangement in a cinema), and no ‘stage’ as such – simply a large floor-space in the front of the room (which seemed even larger for this particular performance, as the works to be played were for solo instrumentalist). ‘Dialogue de l’ombre double’ made the most of the space’s theatrical possibilities; as the lights dimmed, the solo clarinettist (Jérôme Comte) almost sidled in through the side-door, and, during the piece, he made his way round six music-stands, where, as well as playing the score, he triggered electronic material via foot-pedals (this material consisting mostly of untreated fragments of the solo lines which he was playing live – reminiscences and premonitions of what had come before and what was to come), to create the ‘double shadow’ of the title. This is one of Boulez’ most immediately accessible pieces, with plenty of returning melodic material and much use of ascending and descending trills, and Comte gave a seamless and expert performance. Hearing the ‘dialogue’ on CD is one thing, but there was something very special about hearing in performance the contrast between the live, acoustic material, and the electronic playback, as well as the way that they merge, overlap, engage each-other in a kind of slow, teasing dance.

If one was basing one’s judgements simply on conceptual grounds, ‘Anthèmes’ (a piece which Boulez has subsequently re-worked for a large ensemble), might have conjured up associations with the solo violin repertoire. However, in actual fact, it lacks not only the virtuosic extravagance of Paganini, the composer most associated with such work, but the sense of starkness and unadorned emotionalism of, let’s say, Ysaye; instead, it’s often rather pretty (though by no means inanely so), the same melodic material returning again and again to create a sense of contemplative near-stasis that is, nonetheless, belied by the flowing quality of the music. Lacking the dialogic complexities of shadowing and echo present in ‘Dialogue de l’ombre’, the solo voice here seems to be *enhanced* rather than fundamentally questioned, or engaged in conversation, by the electronics: one particular figure is made to sound as if it’s being played by cross between a string section and a not-quite human choir, via the afterglow of delay effects, and the eerie breath-sound of the bow slowly sliding up the string becomes almost unnerving; while the most noticeable rhythmic effect occurs during the passages of scampering pizzicato, their entries and echoes staggered by electronic delay. In itself, though, ‘Anthèmes’ was almost as theatrical as ‘Dialogue de l’ombre’: there was something inherently dramatic about the spectacle of one person in the spotlight, triggering powerful echoes all round the auditorium, simultaneously *in* control (so acquainted with the piece that it could be played from memory) and *unable to* control the electronic shadings and imitations.

In sum, this single evening of works and performances by Boulez was as much of a success as could have been hoped, and might be construed as something of a triumph. It’s certainly a reminder of the sometimes overlooked beauties and complexities of his own compositions, as well as of his status as a titan of the modern music scene. And while one might question the way that the classical world appoints its superstars and sticks with them to the point of adulation (towards the end, Stockhausen seemed to be able to put into practice any crazy idea/whim he wanted to), one could hardly begrudge Boulez his considerable achievements over the years. This was a great coup for the Aldeburgh Festival, and a great experience for those fortunate enough to have witnessed it.

Through a glass, Darkly

LIVRE D’ORGUE, by Olivier Messiaen. Performed by Oliver Brett. King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, Saturday 1st March 2008.

As part of Messiaen’s centenary celebrations, King’s College Chapel in Cambridge are putting on his complete organ works, over a period of several months. Unfortunately, I missed the first concert, which featured Stephen Cleobury playing La Nativité de Seigneur, but on Saturday I made it along to the second in the series, a shorter programme which again only contained one work: Livre d’Orgue, from 1951. The piece was performed by Oliver Brett, who graduated as King’s organ scholar and is now an organ scholar at Westminster cathedral.

Messiaen always had a strange, paradoxical role in twentieth-century classical music. He found himself either criticised by traditionalists for being too weird (with his interest in birdsong, mysticism, Sanskrit, surrealism, and a voluptuous and sensual Catholic conservatism) or by modernists for being too old-fashioned (lush harmonies, sweeping melodies, an obsessively religious programmatic basis for nearly all of his pieces). In the late 40s, he’d written such works as ‘Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine’, scored for orchestra, women’s voice and the otherworldly electronic sounds of the ondes martenot, and the massive ‘Turangalîla-Symphonie,’ a hymn to earthy love which was, in effect, a virtuoso piano concert, drawing on elements of the myth of Tristan and Yseult, Sanskrit symbolism, Javanese Gamelan music, and, of course, birdsong. While these scandalised those who were not quite so esoteric in their Catholicism as Messiaen, they also offended the avant-garde musicians and composers with whom Messiaen was associated through his teaching classes at the Paris Conservatoire, where his pupils had included the likes of Xenakis, Stockhausen and Boulez. Boulez even described Turangalîla as ‘brothel music’ (which would surely have offended Messiaen’s religious sensibilities), and the composer duly changed direction, taking the implications of Schoenberg’s serial (twelve-tone) system even further, and applying them to duration, articulation and dynamics as well as to pitches.

This period of avant-garde experimentation was to prove short-lived, and the pieces Messiaen wrote during this time (including the Livre) are neither his most popular, nor his most critically acclaimed (although they were very influential on the development of Boulez in particular). One can’t help feeling that Messiaen was pushed into a language not his own, and he seems to have realised this too; later in life, he made it clear that he did not feel the music was successful.


So what are we to make of the Livre d’Orgue, then? Well, its concerns seem mainly to be technical, rather than focussing on the emotional/religious/programmatic areas that Messiaen normally covered (although two of the seven movements are inspired by Biblical quotations, and one by birdsong). There is much rhythmic complexity (deriving from Messiaen’s use of Greek and Hindu rhythms).

The first piece, ‘Reprises par Interversion’ is entirely monodic – in other words, only one note sounds a time. This gives it a very fractured, disjointed quality, more akin to Stockahusen or Boulez than to his usual style. It also very much explores a separation between the organ registers: the emphasis is on harsh alternation and juxtaposition, rather than unity. (Although, to be fair, Messiaen had always been composing in ‘blocks’ which were sometimes only tenuously related – he eschewed more conventional notions of linear harmonic development, which gives the music its curiously static, ‘timeless’ quality.)

Following ‘Reprises’ comes the uneasy three-part polyphony of ‘Piece en Trio’, meant to represent the confusion and lack of clear vision faced in life on earth, as expressed in the first half of St Paul’s famous phrase “now see through a glass, darkly, but then we will see face to face.” Messiaen himself later wrote: “I was unable to realise my intention of expressing the darkness [surrounding the Mystery of the Holy Trinity], and only managed to write a short and fairly nondescript dodecaphonic [12-tone] piece: no blackness, no confusion, no mystery.” That illuminates the piece’s impact on me, too: despite the sometimes interesting sounds (Alexander Goehr, another of Messiaen’s pupils, commented that the Livre didn’t really sound like organ music at all – “it sounded like electronics”), it does feel rather colourless when compared to the orgiastic splendour of Turangalila or with the mysterious, grave beauty of the other organ works.

The third movement is more successful: entitled ‘Les Mains de l’Abime’, it erupts as a thunderous cry from the abyss inspired by a quasi-surrealistic verse from the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk: “the abyss has cried out! The depths have raised up their hands!” Sections of massive, dissonant organ thunder bookend a quiet, eerily ambiguous central section, which brings to mind another Biblical description: that of the “still, small voice” with which God speaks to Elijah in the middle of a howling thunderstorm, as the prophet flees into the desert.

As some sort of recovery from the abyss, an interlude based on ‘Chants d’Oiseaux,’ but we’re soon back to more troubled waters, with another rhythmically complex ‘Piece en Trio’, and then, in the following movement, more Old-Testament prophecy, this time from Ezekiel. “The rims of the four wheels were full of eyes all around…for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.” Messiaen’s depiction of these nightmarish eyes in the wheels – ‘Les Yeux dans les Roues’ – is characterised by serious, booming bass pedal notes and rippling, endlessly questioning figures in the higher register.

Finally, in ‘Soixante-Quatre Durees’, a fantastically intricate movement based on sixty-four different note durations, tension is built by slowly moving held notes punctuated by alternating high and low register bursts, somewhat reminiscent of Charles Ives’ ‘The Unanswered Question.’ The piece ends on a final, held note, fading away unexpectedly, unsettlingly, leaving the question answered.


The work as a whole is deeply serious, grave. Messiaen chooses to focus on the darker aspects of the Bible, and Livre seems to fall more into the anguished, mid-century Catholic doubt of Penderecki, than the composer’s usual rhapsodic, paradisal visions.

In other works, such as ‘Les Canyons Aux Etoiles’, the awe and mystery generated by the nature of God and his creation, beyond human comprehension, is celebrated as a source of mystic wonderment: the child-like rapture that can sometimes come from not knowing things. Livre, though, is much more about confusion, doubt, lack of clarity – paradoxically, despite the extremely ordered serial framework, the listener has less to cling on to. Messiaen’s characteristic, slightly off-kilter melodies, are kept largely at bay, and his weird, idiosyncratic harmonic language reined in. It feels too restricted – an attempt to make order that actually ends up creating disorder in the listener’s mind. That’s one way of looking at it, anyway.

I’ve barely talked about the performance at all –I was so preoccupied with trying to understand the work itself that I wasn’t really concentrating on how it was played. I will note that the candlelit surroundings of the Chapel appeared suitably austere, in keeping with the music: shadows were cast on the inscrutable, immobile faces of carvings projecting outwards, high above on the wall, and the stained-glass windows, denied sunlight, showed only the blank blackness of the night outside.

The organ’s not an instrument one normally associates with avant-garde music, and this is a work that constantly catches you off-guard, and doesn’t offer you an alternative: you’re not given the catharsis of shrieking dissonance that Penderecki’s ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’, and neither are you given much consolation. Instead, a curious musical limbo opens up, and there’s no way out.

Livre d’Orgue is a work that puts up barriers, which I find it really hard to engage with, and I can’t help feeling that this is because Messiaen doesn’t really understand serialism. Well, let me qualify that – of course he understands it in a technical sense – he taught serial scores at the Conservatoire – but he just can’t seem to make it his own. Writing within this system causes him to lose his voice, rather than allowing him to express himself through it, as Anton Webern or Arnold Schoenberg had been able to. Perhaps this is because he’s coming out of the same late-Romantic Germanic tradition as the members of the Second Viennese school – but then, neither were the new generation of avant-gardists who had (partly) pressured him into this method. The strict control of the system causes his music to lose some of that woozy unpredictability, and even the birds which make their way into the fourth movement sound distant, filtered through the bars of a serialist cage, rather than fluttering free in the open air of Messiaen’s personal musical language.

Such distancing, such inaccessibility, was heightened by the fact that Oliver Brett was invisible up in the organ loft, meaning that there was no visual centre either. His performance can’t be faulted though – that this concert remained a puzzling, rather troubling experience (in a negative, rather than a stimulating way) was due to the composition itself. There is only so far one can go with interpretation of a score – if something isn’t in the music itself, the performer cannot create it, except in exceptional circumstances, and Brett delivered the Livre as well as could be expected.

I’m not sure whether I will ever understand this work – I think it’s a failure, an interesting failure, but a failure nonetheless. I may come to some epiphany, I may find the key to understanding this piece, but I’m not sure there is a key. We do indeed see through the glass darkly, and maybe we don’t even see through it at all.

A still, small voice.

VINGT REGARDS SUR L'ENFANT JESUS, by Olivier Messiaen. Performed by Joanna MacGregor. St George's, Bristol, Thursday 20th December 2007.

Well, seeing as 2008 is the anniversary year of one of my favourite composers, Olivier Messiaen, I did a spot of internet browsing to see what concerts were being offered up as part of the tribute. Quite a few as it turns out - there's a festival going on at the South Bank, his complete organ works are being performed at King's College Chapel in Cambridge, his opera 'Saint Francois d'Assise' is being staged (in the US and Netherlands, I believe, but unfortunately not the UK - that is one work I would love to see live, though I'd have to be in a suitably contemplative frame of mind, otherwise all that solemn ritual could bore me stiff...)

During this little spot of research, I realised that the celebrations seemed to be beginning early: at 8PM this evening (the 20th), in fact. In the converted Anglican church of St George's, Bristol, pianist Joanna MacGregor gave a performance of the very demanding 'Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant Jesus', a series of 20 'regards' -'gazes' would probably be the best English translation, although I suppose in essence they're really meditations in essence - on the child Jesus. So, for instance, you have 'regard de l'espirit de joie', 'regard de la Pere,' 'regard de la Vierge', and so on - all drawing on traditional Catholic symbolism and mysticism, both that of various well known thinkers and Messiaen's own, somewhat idiosyncratic version/vision (encompassing as it does Hindu and ancient Greek rhythms, ecstatic/erotic/religious desire, elements of atonality and dissonance sitting alongside almost lush/filmic melodies that might seem in bad taste in other contexts. Plenty of spicy harmonies, crashing left hand notes hanging in a pedal-driven haze under sprinkles of high-pitched right hand birdsong, chords inexorably moving their way up the keyboard, bizarre, off-kilter lullabies.


Digression: this picture, as should be obvious, does not show the concert I'm reviewing: I didn't take my camera with me, and this was the only decent picture of the St George's interior I could find on google image search. Shame it doesn't show the work of art above the stage very well, but I think it gives some idea of the setup.

The concert was advertised as being by candelight, which was something of a red herring, as there was also quite substantial lighting coming from ceiling chandeleirs and various other light sources as well. That is, apart from at one point, about three-quarters of the way through, when these were all turned off, leaving only the candles and MacGregor silhouetted at the piano - which I thought fitted in very well with the whole air of intimacy and mystery that the piece radiates, but which was apparently a mistake, as the other lights came back on afterwards (of course, the fact that she probably couldn't read the score in near-darkness was probably a major factor in that decision).

I arrived a few minutes late, due to waiting around for ages at a bus-stop (and, sure enough, after the wait, two came along at once...), and so missed the first movement, 'Regard de La Pere.' As I sat down and gathered my preliminary thoughts, I wasn't entirely convinced by MacGregor's performance - her jazz leanings were apparent with the dexterous way in which she handled the work's complex rhythms (although at times even she seemed to be showing signs (however miniscule) of strain - maybe just nerves, which disappeared as she really got into the music). However, I did feel that she took it a bit fast - admittedly Messiaen's extreme slowness can seem overly ponderous in the wrong hands, so it's a very delicate balance to be trodden, between dull plodding and seeming to almost glide over what he's written, thus losing the emotional significance, the nuance which has to be teased out of perhaps just single notes or phrases. The recordings I own (Peter Serkin, on an old triple LP set I picked up in an Oxfam shop - not sure if it's still in print - and Messiaen's prodigious protege, Pierre Laurent-Aimard) perhaps have the balance just slightly more to my liking. That said, there's no such thing as an ideal performance, and I'm not convinced by the idea that this performance can exist even in one's head - our idea of how a piece of music sounds is created by the performances we hear; we cannot just come to a piece completely fresh or completely new (unless we are competent enough musicians/sight-readers to decipher the score, and in the case of Messiaen, that's a pretty tall order for most people).



So, MacGregor soon settled in (perhaps taking things a bit slower, at a more considered, but by no means laboured pace), and, particularly during the second half, really got to the heart of what the piece is about. Obviously, there is the very dark, vaguely nightmarish writing, symbolising the awe and grandeur inspired by God, by creation, and so on. This is something Messiaen perhaps addressed most notably in his piano concerto 'Des Canyons Aux Etoiles', inspired by a visit to American canyons, and the overwhelming effect they had on him (the same sort of ideas as the Romantic 'sublime'); also in the penultimate scene from St Francois d'Assise', when St Francis receives the stigmata. The soundworld he uses to convey these emotions is in line with a lot of twentieth-century modernism (Schoenberg and all those that followed - though not nearly as cerebral and dry as a lot of academic modern classical can be), and can cause a lot of people to switch off. As I overhead one person saying as they were leaving the concerthall, "it's too dissonant - I just can't get past that to engage with the rest of it." That was partly my experience when I first encountered Messiaen: he was, I suppose, my way into the avant-garde, having experienced pretty traditional fare before (with someone like Debussy being about as far out as I got). But once you accustom your ears to it, you realise that this is only one element of his work (and not a bad thing in itself, at all). Messiaen's music is deeply inspired by his Catholic beliefs, and he very much emphasises the transcendent, the mysterious, abstract concepts such as 'love' and 'peace' which music can capture perhaps better than any other art form (because of its inherently abstract nature). This can lead to opulent, quasi-erotic orchestral canvaseses (the Turangalila Symphony or Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine), immensely slow-moving, mournful/hopeful melodies over static chords (the 'Louange' movements from the Quattor de la Fin Du Temps, the song of the angle from St Francois), or to something perhaps unique to Vingt Regards.

This, in fact, was one aspect of the work that I hadn't really noticed before: a soothing, lullaby quality, that alternates with crashing, pounding granite blocks and virtuoso sparkle-trails. Hence the title of this post: in the (I think) 16th or 17th regard (I somewhat lost track during the performance, as MacGregor only left very brief pauses between movements), the 'theme of joy' (one of the work's leitmotifs, which appears in various guises in several of the movements, giving the whole thing an overall architecture and unity) is transformed from an exotic, slightly queasy dance into a gorgeous, hushed song. Your pulse and heartbeat drop a few notches, and the whole room seemed to have lapsed into reverie, before the fire and fury of the next movement jolted them back, and there was a collective straightening of shoulders, scratching of heads, and clearing of throats. The tender meditativeness combined perfectly with the panel on the wall above the piano, a depiction of Jesus' ascension into heaven, standing in a curious, arcane, dance-like position in the sun above his golden-haloed crowd of disciples; at once inscrutable, other, unknowable, yet also incredibly present, tangible, full of emotion. That, reduced down to its essence, is what Christ means: God and man, God and child, all-powerful ruler and helpless sacrifice. A figure of paradox, but not contradiction - a beautiful conceptual idea, whether or not you buy into Christianity. And I guess this is the achievement of the Vingt Regards, that it reveals this about its subject, in its multi-faceted gazes on him; it is what makes what seems to be a very emotional, abstract piece also a profoundly philosophical and thoughtful one.